Explained | India’s Venus Orbiter Mission

• The Union Cabinet approved Rs 1,236 crore for the Venus Orbiter Mission (VOM), which is expected to be launched sometime in March 2028.

• The VOM will be India’s second interplanetary mission after the Mars Orbiter Mission that was launched on November 5, 2013, and entered the Martian orbit on September 24, 2014.

Highlights of the mission:

• The Venus Orbiter Mission will study the surface topography of the planet, Venusian dust and clouds, lightning, volcanic activity, atmosphere, ionosphere, solar forcing and the Sun-Venus interaction.

• It will also study the underlying causes of the transformation of Venus, which is believed to be once habitable and quite similar to Earth.

• It is expected to answer some of the outstanding scientific questions resulting in various scientific outcomes. 

• The mission will be accomplished by the Department of Space.

• Out of the total fund of Rs 1,236 crore, approximately Rs 824 crore will be spent on the spacecraft.

• ISRO will be responsible for the development of the spacecraft and its launch. The project will be effectively managed and monitored through the established practices prevailing at ISRO. 

• The realisation of the spacecraft and launch vehicle is through various industries and it is envisaged that there would be large employment potential and technology spin-off to other sectors of the economy.

• The data generated from the mission would be disseminated to the scientific community through existing mechanisms

• The mission would enable India for future planetary missions with larger payloads, optimal orbit insertion approaches.

Quick facts on Venus:

• Venus is the second planet from the Sun and is Earth’s closest planetary neighbour. 

• Venus is often called Earth’s twin because it’s similar in size and density. However – there are radical differences between the two worlds.

• Venus has a thick, toxic atmosphere filled with carbon dioxide and it’s perpetually shrouded in thick, yellowish clouds of sulfuric acid that trap heat, causing a runaway greenhouse effect. 

• It’s the hottest planet in our solar system, even though Mercury is closer to the Sun. Surface temperatures on Venus are about 900 degrees Fahrenheit (475 degrees Celsius) – hot enough to melt lead. 

• The surface is a rusty colour and it is peppered with intensely crunched mountains and thousands of large volcanoes.

• Venus has crushing air pressure at its surface – more than 90 times that of Earth.

• Venus rotates on its axis backward, compared to most of the other planets in the solar system. This means that, on Venus, the Sun rises in the west and sets in the east.

• Venus rotates very slowly on its axis – one day on Venus lasts 243 Earth days. The planet orbits the Sun faster than Earth, however, so one year on Venus takes only about 225 Earth days, making a Venusian day longer than its year.

Past missions to Venus

• Venus was the first planet to be explored by a spacecraft – NASA’s Mariner 2 successfully flew by and scanned the cloud-covered world on December 14, 1962. 

• Since then, numerous spacecrafts from the US and other space agencies have explored Venus, including NASA’s Magellan, which mapped the planet’s surface with radar. 

• Soviet spacecraft made the most successful landings on the surface of Venus to date, but they didn’t survive long due to the extreme heat and crushing pressure. 

• More recent Venus missions include ESA’s Venus Express (which orbited from 2006 until 2016) and Japan’s Akatsuki Venus Climate Orbiter (orbiting since 2016).

• NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has made multiple flybys of Venus.

Upcoming missions to Venus

i) Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography, and Spectroscopy (VERITAS) will be the first NASA spacecraft to explore Venus since the 1990s. The spacecraft will launch no earlier than December 2027. It will orbit Venus, gathering data to reveal how the paths of Venus and Earth diverged, and how Venus lost its potential to be a habitable world.

ii) NASA will launch DAVINCI+ mission (Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging Plus) in the late 2020s. After exploring the top of Venus’s atmosphere, DAVINCI will drop a probe to the surface. 

iii) The European Space Agency (ESA) has selected EnVision to make detailed observations of Venus. As a key partner in the mission, NASA is providing the Synthetic Aperture Radar, called VenSAR, to make high-resolution measurements of the planet’s surface features.